The company has taken major steps to address the supply of Internet bandwidth, which is the primary bottleneck affecting the penetration of Internet services in Nigeria. By making available a 10Gigabit connection into the global internet backbone, and conceptualising the ISP Forum, Suburban and Cisco intend to open further dialogue on how additional solutions can be created to address other issues.
Speaking at a media parley at the Eko hotel and Suites in Lagos recently, Bruce Ayonote, chief executive officer (CEO) of Suburban pointed out that the objective of the forum is to make internet as accessible in Nigeria as it is anywhere else on the globe, in terms of quality, speed, price and availability.
His words: "The key to achieving this objective is to create a culture of collaboration between service providers that will be sustained for long-term benefit. Internet Service Providers, as a gateway between the Internet and the people, have a critical role to play in the socio-economic development of Nigeria."Ayonote noted that the Internet is increasingly becoming a necessity in this present information age and Nigerians should have the opportunity to positively leverage this resource to our optimal benefit.Â
Bruce deplored the negative development in Nigeria that that the Internet has not been adequately adopted due to poor infrastructure, especially since Nigeria has the capacity to accelerate development in that area. He added that a lot of ISPs have gone out of business in Nigeria because of the lack of basic infrastructure. He cited that the new generation ISP providers, such as telcos are taking over from traditional providers for this very reason.
According to Ayonote, the development, which will see the current 1.5 gigabytes available in Nigeria increase by more than six times, 10 gigabytes, is aimed at seeing people use more of personal computers, as opposed to the proliferation of cyber cafés, made possible by better affordability of the service.Â
He also added that Cisco was the obvious choice for a technology partner in executing this novel Internet development strategy as eighty percent of Internet traffic runs on Cisco technology."Â
Ayonote further added that Cisco have the expertise and technical know-how to add value to the collaborative effort as well as provide unequivocal business support that would be invaluable to all stakeholders.
Suburban has been at the cutting edge of innovative technological solutions and has successfully built a fibre based Next Generation Network that spans the West Africa sub-region while providing global MPLS connectivity reach. In addition to its strategic relationship with Cisco, Suburban has partnered with other global connectivity and backbone providers to deliver a full compliment of voice, data and video solutions to West Africa's mobile operators, ISPs and enterprise customers.